Homecoming
by SeungSeiRan
Summary: And Sleeping Beauty was doomed to return to her nightmare. Hojo, Lucrecia-centric.


An attempt at 'dark and twisty'.

Disclaimer: I don't own FFVII or any of the characters depicted.

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Once upon a time, as was often the case, he'd been a boy. Childhood and innocence and other lies he'd been told back then remain clouded in chalkboard dust, a blank black space where he rewrites the future in symbolism. The past stagnates behind lines of formulae and Lucrecia's diagrams. She was the better artist and this was one of the few privileges he had granted her. To allow that spark of creativity to flourish within his confines. And conditions. Always one covering up another, one grey cloud obscuring the next storm.

A figure lies scrawled upon the board. Another figment of Lucrecia's machinations, one whose blood she colors with the closest substitute for red chalk: lipstick, warm and smooth and fresh from Scarlet's secret stash. She fills the heart, lets it flow through the arteries and return from the veins, turquoise threads streaked pink where the red cells are supposed to shine. Like the red of a discolored sclera, the red of an eye narrowing in suspicion, the red of a cape wrapping round its prone body… trapped… suppressing wrath and envy.

He saves his anger, allows it to accumulate in the pit of his loins and dance fires in his chest until the implosion is inevitable. It's too late for her to suppress the scream but too early for it to be heard or for anyone to care if it is. Legs spread apart, her eyes shining with unshed tears like slivers of crescents trembling from their weight in the night air. Like snow upon bare wooden branches in winter, so close to their breaking point. When he releases his fury, the effect is immediate afterwards. A sheet spotted in crimson and speckles of sticky white essence. A banner of their union.

Mornings come. Bathed in sterile light, the salt is dry on her cheeks. Sleeping Beauty sleeps in a nest of torn sheets as he watches the swell of her belly grow in phases with each month that descends until it's almost a full moon. The nights eventually drain of their past rage, now empty bowls stained with red rivulets drying brown. And he now lies awake next to her, watching her with a pleasure so arcane that it's wretched. The child will surely grow to be a survivor with the proof lying in the life it's already sucked from the years of the mother.

She winces, her hands straying to the pillow beside her, above and away from the growing beast.

"It kicked."

But he denies her once more. The bottle of painkiller solution is small and red, the color of his absolution and her downfall. But when he shakes it into a glass syringe, she realizes the illusion played on her. It's the medicine that's the color of blood, not the bottle it used to be contained in. By instinct, she wills herself out of her body as he injects the fluid into her spine. In a way, the feeling of physical pain and mental numbness is no different from when he'd taken her before.

It must be a terrible sin for a mother to despise her own child but she cannot feel the effects of the punishment just yet. The present ordeal is a hell of its own, wrought with red-hot spurts of pain. For that is how deep it burns, how deep Hojo's brand has penetrated below her skin. The boy will have a name and a number and be confined to the same cage as her. They would flay him alive just like they were doing her right now. With that flame of vindictiveness singeing her dreams, reality begins to take on a tarnished glow like a light that flows through a burnt-out shell.

He awaits the day reclined in his favorite chair, one that feels like it's made of old velvet and sharp bone. He pictures the painting, the perfect egg bloated with the rotten embryo, the shell splitting apart and the yolk dripping through his fingers. Instead of golden-yellow, it colors his skin scarlet and renders a promise of sweet revenge. Plucking a cherry from the bowl beside him, he squeezes the fruit and picks the seed under the nail of his thumb. Fingers and palm wet with the juice, he licks it off one digit at a time and tries to place the name of this particular hue. Carmine? Cerise? Coquelicot?

The blackboard has never appeared so bare to her as it does at this moment. She will be broken at anytime soon and the idea of it sharpens her resolve like the chalk cradled in her fist is the deadliest of blades. No time to think, no time to understand the method in her madness, but to carve in the last shards of evidence of her existence. The chalk is white, ghostly white in its imprint, white lines forming the silhouette's outline. The hair and skin follow.

Not a trace of life in the figure's coloring.

If she lets her eyes wander to the picture shaded in evening moonlight, each strand of hair on her son's head shines silver. A beautiful boy, nothing like what his roots ought to dictate. Her boy, her own, to be borne by her alone…

The last of her long-sentient affection is struck down by the clanging of chains being released from their hold. Hell's gates are flung open and she is ripe for the taking, falling, falling, her drenched hand smearing the portrait of her future as she collapses to the floor, writhing at the ache. The demon is growling inside, clawing at the skin of her womb, yearning to unleash it's brand of justice. At last, her vision swarms with those overdue tears. She can only discern the gleam of a blade and the scarlet painkiller potion.

She should have told him the truth. That his hands and heart are too riven with fissures for anything worth of her to bloom. Then all Lucrecia knows is the surrounding darkness and that she does not want to ever wake up from this sleep.


End file.
